Ten Years of MATathon: When Innovation Becomes Culture

On Friday, September 19, 2025, we celebrated a very special edition of our annual hackathon, the MATathon. It wasn’t just another event: this year marked the 10th anniversary since the very first edition in 2015.

Back in 2015, our CEO Matías Lambert published a blog titled “Why Should a Network Expert Attend a Hackathon?”. His message was clear: telecom engineers needed to embrace programming skills in order to remain relevant. What at the time sounded like an early call for evolution has now become an undeniable reality: over the past decade, the intersection of networks and software has shifted from being optional to becoming the very core of our industry.

The MATathon was born in that same spirit. Because a hackathon is not just about intensive coding. At Iquall, we see it as a cultural accelerator, a space where we can break inertia and think differently. It is also an innovation engine, where ideas emerge that later turn into products, use cases, or new capabilities for our customers. And above all, it is a learning accelerator, because in just a couple of intense days, experimentation and evolution happen at a pace that would otherwise take months.

This year’s challenge was linked to one of the most relevant initiatives in the telco industry: the CAMARA Project, and in particular its Blockchain Public Address API, on top of which our teams delivered a functional proof of concept that demonstrated how this capability can be integrated into real telecom scenarios.

From a technical standpoint, this API allows an operator to verify if a blockchain public address belongs to one of its subscribers. In other words, it bridges the identity managed by the telco (line, SIM, subscription) with the decentralized identity in blockchain (wallets, public addresses). This unlocks tangible use cases such as secure authentication in Web3 environments, fraud prevention in digital transactions, and the development of blockchain-based financial services with an additional layer of trust provided by the mobile network.

The entire solution in this edition ran on the MAT Suite, natively integrated with Google Cloud services. Specifically, we leveraged BigQuery for large-scale data analytics, Vertex AI for experiments with AI models, and Apigee for secure API management and exposure, among others. This combination allowed us to rapidly scale infrastructure, deploy prototypes in a cloud-native environment, and showcase how the integration between MAT and Google Cloud can accelerate the creation of new business models in telecom.

What makes a MATathon valuable is not only the outcome but also the process. Ten years later, we remain convinced that the true value lies in the journey: experimenting, failing, learning, adjusting, and trying again, in a collaborative environment that amplifies the best of each individual.

Ultimately, the MATathon has become part of our DNA. And if this decade of hackathons has taught us anything, it is that in such a dynamic sector, the ability to experiment together is the best way to prepare for the future.